<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Forget-Me-Not by Elsey8</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29388303">Forget-Me-Not</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsey8/pseuds/Elsey8'>Elsey8</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Persona 5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Domestic, Falling In Love, Fluff, Gift Giving, Love Languages, M/M, Persona 5: The Royal Spoilers</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 08:02:19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,570</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29388303</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsey8/pseuds/Elsey8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Akira likes to give people gifts, and Goro can't seem to understand why for the life of him.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira, Akechi Goro/Persona 5 Protagonist</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>178</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Forget-Me-Not</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>It starts innocently enough. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Goro knows Akira gives gifts to his friends. He gives gifts to </span>
  <em>
    <span>everyone</span>
  </em>
  <span>, lord knows where he gets the money to do it, but it’s just something he does and everyone just accepts. It’s part of him, and it’s something in which he doesn’t really take no for an answer. Goro tried to refuse him before, and it just...somehow he ended up with the gift in hand anyway. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Akira puts a clear amount of effort into his connections, time and care that Goro feels nearly bad for soaking up without deserving it. Not quite, though. He still takes it all to hoard greedily, because in the end he will pathetically crave attention in this way. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Akira takes him out, and very often. They do so many things together, go out to different places to do different things, some of which Goro is completely unfamiliar with. He is given experiences he never would’ve imagined having, and sometimes he feels like an actual kid just spending time with a friend and sometimes he feels like a fraud deceiving someone he can’t afford to care about. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>At the end of it, almost every time, he gets a little gift. Some trinket that he considers throwing away but always forgets to in the end. He holds onto each as if it’s precious, even though he knows he really shouldn’t. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He has an army of them in his apartment, arranged carefully on the shelf that sits above his desk. He has them laid out on top of it, partially so he doesn’t have to look at them constantly but also because he doesn’t want to ruin them. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>A pen that he hasn’t used, a finished Rubix cube, a small collection of featherman figures, the assortment of skin care products he’s never opened, and a few other little things he’s gotten from places he’s gone. A mothman toy Akira had won from a capsule machine that he’d stopped  Goro in the middle of his commute just to give to him is Goro’s favorite among them, even though he’d never tell Akira as much. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>There’s a little fake plant that sits on his desk, after he’d killed the first three real ones Akira tried to give him. He remembers how he’d been giving it to him, peering slightly up at him from behind those long eyelashes as if somehow </span>
  <em>
    <span>shy </span>
  </em>
  <span>over it. Like Goro wasn’t simply going to take it with a polite smile and secretly treasure it. Like he does with everything Akira gives to him. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Goro doesn’t give him things in return, he never gives Akira anything but his own worthless time and personal deception. Akira never seems to expect more than that, even if Goro suspects he might know Goro is holding things back from him. Even with so little, Akira is never the one to reach out to him. He always accepts when Goro asks, and sometimes he walks up expectantly like he’s just hoping that he’ll ask to spend time together. But Akira is never the one to ask, and it almost gets on Goro’s nerves some of the time. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He still goes along with Akira’s whims whenever he has the time to spare, because in the end he...has trouble turning him down. It always feels like kicking a puppy. Which, contrary to popular belief, he doesn’t like to do. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He knows it’s possible to gain money from the Metaverse, he’s abused that more than a few times. He’s fairly sure that’s where Akira collects his funds for gift giving like this but...it’s a lot. It’s still a lot. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Akira knows a lot of people, and it’s honestly a mystery to him how he manages to take care of it all. He wonders, a little selfishly, if he gets the most out of everyone. It feels like an overwhelming amount sometimes. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>And he gets his answer in the place he least expects it. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He’s following the Phantom Thieves through Okumura’s Palace, tailing them just slightly behind to observe their progress. He needs to know when he needs to take out Okumura, which leaves him watching them fumble their way through a place he could tear through in an hour tops. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>It mostly consists of Akira threatening Shadows out of their money, which would explain how he gets so much of it, but is frankly funny to see as well. Sometimes he messes up and Goro watches the others step in to help. They could be saving up for new equipment, or perhaps there’s something more nefarious in the purpose, or there could be some other use to it that he can’t see in the short term yet. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>And then Akira drags him out, just after the calling card is sent as if he can read how stressed he is over it. And he fits an extremely expensive looking silver bangle onto his wrist, grinning. He doesn’t hand it over, he just takes Goro’s wrist and puts it on for him without a single word of explanation. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>To be fair, Goro doesn’t have words to thank him either, nor is he sure if he </span>
  <em>
    <span>should</span>
  </em>
  <span>. If that’s what he’s supposed to do in this situation. He isn’t sure what the gift is supposed to mean, so he just...leaves it. He certainly can’t wear it though, so he just sets it up on the gift shelf tucked behind the others and tries not to look at it when he gets back after killing Okumura in a direct way to ruin Akira’s life. Of course, what does it really matter when Akira is supposed to end up dead anyway? </span>
</p><p>
  <span>In the following days, Goro doesn’t hear a single word from him. Not so much as a text, and his momentary lapse in judgement in reaching out to him is ignored. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>When they hang out again, Akira is unusually distracted, and Goro feels like he doesn’t have a right to question him on it. He doesn’t get a gift for his efforts, and he doesn’t try to bridge the gap that’s growing between them. He leaves it be. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>After Goro joins the Phantom Thieves though, things get worse. Joining may be a bit of an exaggeration even, considering he blackmailed his way in and none of them seemed particularly happy about that. Although Akira’s eyes had this certain shine to them that Goro couldn’t entirely read because his glasses obscured his face too much. His hands were shoved in his pocket, his posture so carefully neutral that Goro couldn’t read any bit of what he was thinking. So the rest of them had seemed annoyed, and Akira could’ve been thinking anything and Goro wouldn’t have been able to tell. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>After that, Akira only gets more...bold. Goro isn’t sure what other word to use for how he is suddenly being buried in gifts he knows Akira is wasting Metaverse money on.  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He gets upgrades to his gear that he never would’ve imagined getting for himself, not to mention that he isn’t even sure where Akira finds this stuff. It is top of the line, and as far as Goro can tell he’s the one with the nicest equipment, not even Akira has him matched. As if he’s going to need all of this after the Phantom Thieves “disband”. Sometimes Goro feels like he can’t understand what’s going on in his head. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Akira presses to spend more time with him, and it all becomes too much. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Goro, in a typical and predictable fashion, has to retreat. He can’t do this, he can’t be this close right now. He’s going to ruin everything and he </span>
  <em>
    <span>knows </span>
  </em>
  <span>that. He’s always known this was going to get in the way, and he let it happen. He wanted it to happen. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>But now, Goro feels like as the plan starts to come to its fatal end, he...he doesn’t know what he should be feeling anyway. What should he do when by the end of the month, Akira will be dead by his hand? What is he supposed to do with that? </span>
</p><p>
  <span>How can he possibly accept what Akira is giving him now, even knowing that? </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He does the only thing he feels like he can do, he lashes out instead. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He pushes Akira away with all of his strength, holds him at arm's length and tells himself over and over that he </span>
  <em>
    <span>hates him, hates him, hates him. </span>
  </em>
  <span>They fight, and Goro hates him, they speak and he hates him more, the acceptance of his challenge makes him burn hot in fury and ire. He hates Akira, he always has. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He wonders how many times he needs to say it for it to be true. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>The night before they infiltrate Sae’s Palace for the final time, Akira takes him out to the jazz club. They sit together, and at the end of it Akira hands him a book about Robin Hood. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Robin Hood: The Outlaw,</span>
  </em>
  <span> bound in thick leather and so...old looking. This doesn’t seem like a new book at all, it looks like one that’s been read over and over. Loved and worn in, and when Goro flips open the cover he sees Akira’s handwriting all over the inside of it. Marked as his, with his own notes in the margins, pen and pencil and marker alike. There are sentences that are underlined, highlighted, words circled and prose filling the pages until it all looks so crowded and messy and </span>
  <em>
    <span>loved. </span>
  </em>
  <span>It is loved, it is wholly Akira’s, and he has been given it just like that. The night before he’s meant to take Akira’s life from him. As with the bangle, he hardly has the strength to say thank you. He runs from it. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Goro shoots Akira in the head the next day and reads the book until his body forces itself to shut down. Throughout all of it, he doesn’t know if he actually reads a single sentence, or if it’s just Akira’s own words curling in his mind to stay. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He keeps all of Akira’s gifts on that shelf and looks at it less. And he keeps his head down and buckles down on a plan he’s sure isn’t going to work anymore. The book stays on his desk, his own sticky notes laid atop of Akira’s own notes to mark his favorite parts. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Goro wonders if, when he dies, this book will be the last proof of his and Akira’s existence. Or if maybe it’ll disappear along with him, left to turn to dust. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>In the engine room, Goro crumbles to dust himself. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>The last gift Akira gives him is his freedom. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>And then he’s back. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Goro breathes in through his mouth and out through his nose, and he’s back. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He gives Akira the only thing he has left in his freedom. He allows himself to be locked away, to make this one last sacrifice, to hope that this one good thing can possibly fix the rest. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Things go too quickly after that. It feels like hardly any time at all before he’s out and everything is </span>
  <em>
    <span>wrong. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>He goes to Akira, because of course he goes to Akira. Who else would he go to? </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Akira gives him a few answers, a couple options, and that means everything to him when he doesn’t have anything right now. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>The night between them where there is nothing left to hide, Goro brings Akira to his apartment. It has never truly felt like his, but he has made a lot of progress just lately in populating it. Ever since Akira came to Tokyo, Goro’s life has changed drastically. The change fundamentally goes all the way to his own apartment. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Akira’s gifts have their own shelves, Goro has gotten addicted to coffee so he has too many travel mugs now, his wardrobe has shifted to something more to his actual style just because if Akira sees him either way it doesn’t matter. These are little differences that don’t matter too much in the long run, but to Goro...he hadn’t changed in years before Akira. This is a lot. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Akira closes the door behind them, silent. He hasn’t said anything their whole way here, staying stubbornly quiet like he’s punishing Goro for forcing him into the decision he didn’t want. Goro had tried to make it a choice while still trying to argue for what he thought was right, and he’s worried he just made things unbelievably worse. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Akira?” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Akira looks at him, and he just...he seems so tired. He’d cried when Maruki had left, he had begged Goro to find something else for them, some way to just let this pass them by. Just leave it, they don’t even have to do anything, and come on it’s so much easier not to do something than it is to do it. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>In the end, Akira may have been upset and a little angry and a lot resentful, but he’d given Goro his word that they’d steal Maruki’s treasure. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Now he just looks tired. His eyes are a little red, a lot swollen. His lip is bitten raw, and there are tear stains on the inside of his glasses. His eyes are defeated, and Goro hates that it’s his fault. Somewhere along the line he let their game go too far, he let himself hurt Akira for no other reason than the fact that he didn’t want to let go. He </span>
  <em>
    <span>couldn’t </span>
  </em>
  <span>let go. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Akira doesn’t quite answer him, but he’s staring right at him, as if daring him to say one more thing to break him. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Akira, why did you give me so many gifts? You always spent so much on me, and I never really knew what to do with it. It seemed like more than the others.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Akira leans against the door, and he drops his head down. Forward, until his chin rests against his chest and his hair blocks any of Goro’s attempts to see his face. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Did you keep them?” he asks. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Come on,” Goro prompts. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He starts walking, and he doesn’t bother to look back. He hears Akira’s light footsteps following behind him anyway, he doesn’t </span>
  <em>
    <span>need </span>
  </em>
  <span>to look.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>When he opens his bedroom door, he walks right over to the shelf and starts to pull the gifts down. He slips the silver bangle over his wrist first, then puts the rest out on his desk. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Giving is...it’s a love language. Mine. A way I express how I feel about people, show them that I care about them and am thinking about them. Simple gifts, things that remind me of them. Then the extravagant things, the ones I invest time and money into obtaining, just because. Just for them.” Akira reaches down and picks up the pen. “When words don’t work, this is what I use instead.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Goro breathes out, back in. He fights the exhaustion inside of him, the part that tells him it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t care how anymore, he wants to </span>
  <em>
    <span>stay. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>But he made his choice, and going back on it will only confuse and hurt Akira more. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Would you mind if I give something back to you? I’m fairly certain I won’t need it after tomorrow,” Goro says. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Regifting isn’t normally something he would do, but none of this is anything he’s even slightly familiar with anyway. Akira is something new, and unknown. He seems to enjoy sharing the newness with him more than anything. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Goro doesn’t need to know what he’s doing. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Are you sure?” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Goro picks up </span>
  <em>
    <span>Robin Hood: The Outlaw. </span>
  </em>
  <span>It’s now hardly readable between his sticky notes stuck between the lines and Akira’s scribbles littering each page as if it were their book, authored together rather than something borrowed. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He hands it back to Akira, letting his finger brush the weathered spine of it as it leaves his hands. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Akira flips it open, and he starts looking through. His eyes scan the pages, flicking back and forth, quickly turning pages and inspecting it as if he’s never seen it before. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Goro thinks he reads through the whole thing in the time they stand there across from each other, and when he puts it in his bag he doesn’t say anything. He just...he just cradles Goro’s face in his two hands as gently and reverently as he held the book just moments ago. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He says, “</span>
  <em>
    <span>Goro</span>
  </em>
  <span>.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>It sounds like a prayer, like a plea, like in that simple name he speaks of the world. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m sorry,” he says back. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>All they can do at that point is lay together, Akira playing with the bangle around his wrist as he dozes in and out of consciousness. He tries to wait for the sun to rise, but Akira puts him to sleep before it’s even on the horizon. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Before they go into Maruki’s Palace for the last time, Akira hands him a small bouquet of forget-me-nots. Goro isn’t sure when he had the time to sneak out considering he hardly slept, and they were together the whole time as far as he knows, but he takes them anyway. He doesn’t have a vase in his apartment so the best he can do is a tall glass. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“They’re going to die,” Goro points out. “I’m god awful at keeping plants alive.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Akira smiles slightly bitterly, and he shrugs. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Will it matter after today?” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Nothing will.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But it </span>
  <em>
    <span>does </span>
  </em>
  <span>matter. It matters, because when Goro next wakes up he </span>
  <em>
    <span>wakes</span>
  </em>
  <span> up. He’s alive. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He is real and solid and when he turns his head in his apartment the book is laying on his desk, taunting him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The first thing he does is take a bath. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He fills his tub all the way to the top with scalding hot water and feels something like satisfaction as he sinks in and the water overflows over the side. It burns his skin in a way that he can only sit in and think that he’s actually </span>
  <em>
    <span>alive</span>
  </em>
  <span>. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Wet hair sticks to his skin and feels almost suffocating. He doesn’t have scissors in his bathroom, but there is a pocket knife tucked in the hoodie pocket he was wearing. He picks up the sopping wet material from his half flooded bathroom floor and pulls the tool out. He flips the knife out and takes it immediately to his hair. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He saws it off as close to the root as he can, then turns to his other side to do the same. He’s sure it looks awful, but he sinks back down in the tub to let more water overflow and doesn’t care. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>When he gets out of the bath, he leaves the water where it is and hopes it leaks through the floor and to the ceiling of the apartment below him. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>And the first thing he notices is the single white rose sitting on his desk, then the absence of the book. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>There is a single sticky note stuck to the edge of his gift shelf. </span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Take it back, if you can. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>It isn’t signed, but then again it doesn’t need to be. Goro had been ready to part with the book back then, he was sure he had said all that needed to be said and handing it over to Akira was the only way to go about the rest of this. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He was sure that he was doing what was best for both of them, in trying to give Akira something, anything. He never gave him what he needed, so at least this one time… </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Well. Goro thinks he has a few things he may have left out in his notes. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>They play this game long after they catch one another in the act and start hanging out normally again. Even when they move in together, they keep playing this game of possession with their book. It is somehow an integral part to their relationship, a playful aspect neither of them ever get bored of. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Their first kiss is passed off as Akira snatching the book at the end of it and handing over a white jasmine he pulls out of his pocket. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Their sticky notes are in chronological order in a scrapbook Akira keeps, which Goro makes fun of but would do anything to keep safe anyway. </span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Take it back, if you can </span>
  </em>
  <span>turns to </span>
  <em>
    <span>I forgot flowers but I found some mint </span>
  </em>
  <span>to </span>
  <em>
    <span>Do I win yet </span>
  </em>
  <span>to </span>
  <em>
    <span>While you’re at it pick up milk. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>Their book is just as much of a mess. Goro would just as much do anything to ensure it stays just the way it is. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Just as easily, one day the book has been taken from his desk and replaced with a bouquet of violets. Wrapped up in the sticky note is a simple ring, and all the note has written on it is a single question mark in the middle. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He hears Akira start laughing in the other room, and Goro can’t help but laugh with him. He wonders if Akira was surprised to open their book to find the ring inside, and his own sticky note of the exact same nature. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Goro learns to understand and adore Akira’s love language, and even that isn’t even a fraction of how much he loves Akira himself. He would sooner burn their book than see Akira burn his hand. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He feels that feeling reciprocated in every flower Akira leaves behind for him. </span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>If you liked this, feel free to come talk to me on <a href="https://twitter.com/Elsey_8">Twitter</a></p></blockquote></div></div>
</body>
</html>